


Waldo And Me

by Ayes



Category: Twilight RPF
Genre: Dogs, F/M, Living Together, Long-Distance Relationship, Long-Term Relationship(s), References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-22 03:03:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12472028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ayes/pseuds/Ayes
Summary: Rob buys a puppy. Domesticity tries to follow.





	Waldo And Me

Kristen's phone rings at two oh three and she counts to ten before she opens her eyes.  
  
There's no way that a phone call at two oh three can be anything approaching _good_. At the best, it's a drunk dial. At the worst, it's an accident.  
  
It's Rob.  
  
"Hey." She flips her phone open and holds it near her face, unwilling to wake up enough to put it to her ear. "It's two."  
  
"It's _ten_ here." He doesn't sound apologetic; in fact, it sounds like he's asking her why it isn't ten _there_ , too.  
  
"Why, uh." She has to be on set in the morning. She has to cut all her hair into a mullet in the morning. She can't be on the phone right now, it's a Tuesday and it's two oh four already. "What's up?"  
  
"Oh, that." Something in the background is lifted, and she can _hear_ him drinking something. It wakes her up, a little bit, the thought of his throat tipped back and of him swallowing, licking his lips, and pressing her voice closer to his ear. This long distance thing seemed like it would be okay the night before he left for home, the way they pressed promises into each others' skin after she finally admitted that she didn't want him to go, and the way he left her among their promises for meetings and responsibility, but left her as his.  
  
It's harder than they'd both thought.  
  
"I was thinking," he said, keeping her from thinking about it too much again, because goodness knows she's lost enough sleep... "I was thinking," he repeats, "I want a puppy."  
  
Kristen's voice is flat when she asks him "What do you mean." This is why he woke her up?  
  
"Well," he shifts, and for the first time she realizes how much more than just his throat she can hear in the background. "I mean I just bought a puppy."  
  
****  
  
Kristen takes a four day break from filming and, against all reason, spends the first eleven hours and five minutes flying to London.  
  
He picks her up at the airport with a sign that says SEX KITTEN and a mop of black and grey hair on a long blue leash wrapped around his wrist. She is too tired to leap on him; she's spent an entire day watching and rewatching romantic comedies, stuck next to a businessman whose typing was somehow loud as hell, and wondering what on _earth_ possessed her weirdo boyfriend to acquire a dog that she's now learned resembles a dust bunny.  
  
"Your hair looks the same," she says, when the puppy is scratching up her leg eagerly and Rob offers her a one-armed hug and a kiss on the head. He grins and rubs the mop on his head. He's been playing music with his friends for days, she knows; she had to call his mom to set an alarm on his phone to come get her. But here he is.  
  
Even though she's known him for longer than she can even believe, Kristen still feels a quiet thrill that _here he is_ , and here she is. Together, which basically means the photographers are sure to find them any moment. She grins at him and scoops up the puppy, who licks her under the chin, and smells awful.  
  
"Ready?"  
  
****  
  
As soon as they get back to Rob's house and his mom has fussed over Kristen for twenty minutes and his dad has made off-color jokes for ten, she goes upstairs to see his room.  
  
The view is of the nondescript street and there are books and plaid everywhere. It smells like some cheap cologne equivalent to Axe and a little bit like incense. She sniffs and raises her eyebrows, and he shrugs.  
  
"Covers the weed. You know." She does know. There's no dog bed; but the twin bed itself is covered in dog hairs that she can already identify. Kristen sees the photo her dad took of them before their first premier, stuck to his mirror, and smiles.  
  
"I like it." She'd call it cute, but she knows not to do that. He lets her shower and take a nap in his room, and the weirdness of being in London in Rob's childhood bedroom doesn't hit her until she's naked in an unfamiliar light and using his Suave. She's too tired to unpack afterward, so she rolls down the waist of the debatably clean sweats he brings her and crashes in the shirt she's been wearing for something like fourteen hours.  
  
It's the best she's slept in weeks.  
  
****  
  
When Kristen wakes up, she finds Rob downstairs, alone and eating an Eggo.  
  
"I haven't seen an Eggo in a while," she says, sitting down next to him. The sky outside is grey and she doesn't know what time it is; eleven AM or four PM. She doesn't much care.  
  
"You haven't been looking," he scoffed. "But I never leggo." She gives him a look that means You Are Crazy, and he cracks a grin. "You know you missed me."  
  
"I did." She scoots her chair over and he puts his arm around her. "Where's the dog?"  
  
Rob frowns and looks around the kitchen. "Uh."  
  
They can't find the dog for over forty minutes, and he wanders around the house his parents have vacated for the evening, shouting "STELLA!" and scowling like Brando.  
  
"You have to be wet," she notes, remembering her _Streetcar_ , and she sprays him with her thumb over the sink faucet when he comes back to double-check the kitchen.  
  
She chases him to rip his shirt, next, and he runs because he's wearing one of his favorite rags. He grabs her around the waist and drags her into his chest and they're suddenly making out in the hallway, against the wall, a pictureframe askew because of his shoulder.  
  
They find his bedroom again, shuffling toes against toes with him guiding her backwards.  
  
He eases her onto the bed with lingering kisses that pull her lips into his, and when she looks over her shoulder she-- sees the dog, who has come to investigate this new turn of events.  
  
"I found Waldo," she whispers, and they descend into giggles.  
  
****  
  
Waldo goes to bed early and fat after he eats an entire chicken breast Mrs. Pattinson had been making for dinner. They order Chinese and separate the different dishes into bowls. She spears stringbeans on her fork and he manages chopsticks better than she'd expected.  
  
That night their spooning turns into forking and he pulls the sheets over their heads and stares into her eyes so deep that she feels kind of scared.  
  
She feels indecently overheated and full and it aches somehere in her belly, sparks in her chest, tenses her shoulders as he fucks her. She could never do this with anything less than all of her. All of her was alive, and it should have hurt, the force of living, should scare her more than it does even now, but she trusts him implicitly, and that means more than she knew it could.  
  
Sweat gathers along his hairline and Robert stretches one leg behind him, forcing his weight all against her so that he's more deep than she'd thought possible. There's no room to move, but they don't need it. Their hot breaths mingle and she pushes on his chest so that she can straddle him and frame his body in her legs.  
  
She touches the hair under his bellybutton and later her fingers spasm as he slides out of her, _the better to slip back in_ , until she comes and he comes and they end up spooning again, even closer this time and stuck with sweat.  
  
Sometime later Kristen will remember it as the first time they make love.  
  
****  
  
They take Waldo to be groomed the next day and Kristen is shocked to realize that not only does he actually _have_ eyes, but they're a liquid chocolate that light up when he kisses her on the way home.  
  
Now that most of Waldo's scruff is gone, they can tell that he's a weird sort of biggish terrier with a short neck and dark curls that are trimmed close to his body.  
  
"Where did you get him?" She asks, rubbing Waldo's back on the way out the door, his paws slung around Rob's neck as Rob carries him like a bag of groceries against his chest and Waldo's tongue lolls out unconcernedly.  
  
"He was in a box outside Tesco's." Rob opens the door to his car for her. She's glad she remembered to follow him to the right side of it.  
  
She holds the puppy in the car, and coos to him at red lights. "Wallyyy, you box dog." He's kind of grown on her, the mutt.  
  
Besides, watching Rob take care of the puppy is the most precious thing ever. In the two and a half days they spend running around London and making out in parks, she gets to see how Rob's eyes crinkle up when Waldo learns how to shake with strangers outside the Trafalgar Square fountain, and how Rob spends the rest of the afternoon teaching him how to pound it.  
  
****  
  
She cries when she has to go home. She cries in the bathroom so that he can't hear her, and more in his arms when he finds her anyway.  
  
She cries when she's home unpacking, and feels stupid when her cosmetics bag ends up a little wet. Kristen texts Rob to let him know she's home, but doesn't call him right away. She's never been a clingy girlfriend, even though she sort of understands it now.  
  
Kristen gives in and calls him after a dinner with her family; it doesn't feel like she's trying to escape them back to Rob that way, though she wouldn't mind. The way he answers hello is full of suppressed happiness that she picks up on so easily she doesn't register it as suppressed. They talk about nothing for ten minutes, and then he has to go to bed.  
  
She tucks her blankets into a nest on the bed, arranges her pillow just right, and it's not  two minutes later that he calls her back.  
  
Her phone vibrates off of her nightstand and she kneels on the floor to answer it. All she can hear is a faraway whining. Waldo. Then there's a sigh in her ear.  
  
"He misses you."  
  
Kristen leans her forehead against her bed and smiles. "Yeah?"  
  
"Yeah. I guess he's yours, too." She laughs, but he isn't done. "I guess both of us are."  
  
She's quiet for so long that her calves cramp up, and they both listen to Waldo. Then she says it; what she's been thinking. "I miss you too much."  
  
"Don't worry," he promises. Her legs ache, and her heart feels like a life gone wrong or a house on fire, and she believes him.  
  
****  
  
There's a whole lot of paperwork to fill out before Waldo can come, like Columbus before him, to America. Kristen is so excited she can hardly stand it, because he's coming on the blue leash of her matinée idol.  
  
Her sign says WALDO and (and friend) in teeny tiny letters on the bottom of it. She'd made it sitting in her overheated car in LAX Parking Garage 3, and her face is flushed a little red and she isn't sure her gum is covering her Doritos breath properly.  
  
He wraps his arms around her in a bear hug when he comes out of the gates, and she buries her face into his jacket. He smells worse than her; she missed him.  
  
Waldo is in a crate covered in stickers, and Rob loads the crate into the backseat of her car so he doesn't make them crash while she's driving. She peeks into the air-holes at red lights, and finally sees a glint on his collar that she asks about.  
  
"They don't give out wings when you fly anymore, did you know that?" he answered.  
  
"No, I didn't."  
  
"Yeah, I had to buy his." His arm around her shoulders is like being home already, and she stays under the speed limit all the way home.  
  
****  
  
They stay in a hotel room so that he can get some sleep away from her loving but crazy family, who are keeping Waldo in the yard, and she watches the graceful way he accepts the upgrade from the female concierge when they get there.  
  
"You could say no to those crazy women, you know," she comments in the elevator. She slips her hand into his, and he shifts the bag on his shoulder so that he can bump his side against hers.  
  
"That might be worse than doing nothing about it," he says, and then they get lost in smiling at each other in a way that's kind of gay until their door dings open.  
  
She's glad that he accepted the bigger room when they get to it; they immediately take their pants off and stretch out on the opulent couch with a remote in his hand and his sunglasses on her nose. He's uncorked a bottle of champagne, but they're too tired and horizontal to drink it, so it sits next to the TV Guide and the eighth she's brought him in a little glass jar.  
  
He tips her chin up toward him with two strong fingers that hold her head gently in place when he bends in to kiss her. Rob always kisses like he's got an audience, like everyone should see how he likes kissing _this_ girl, and she's never gotten used to it. She finds his mouth with her lips already parted, and his tongue is ready to meet her, to find her own with no resistance.  
  
He pulls back his fingers and slides his other hand out from around her and his hands split up in teams, one south and one north. It's a heat-seeking missile. It's a tactical strike. He knows now: she wants whatever he does to her, always has, and his south hand finds her panties the moment his north hand reaches her nipples, both, because his hands are so large these days.  
  
"I love you," Rob says, before kissing her again.  
  
His fingers curl and flex inside her, two and three and she feels like she's going to stretch out and die, maybe die with him touching her, but instead she comes.  
  
****  
  
There's a storm in October and Waldo flips his shit. He gets so scared that he runs out past Kristen's legs when she goes to lock the screen, and she can barely see where he's shooting off to in the intermittent and misty light. Kristen is wearing Rob's boxers and a hoodie, but she forgets she's still barefoot when she runs out after him.  
  
She runs through neighbor's yards and stops when her chest aches, choosing the nearest bush to begin her search. They had to name him fucking Waldo, it seemed so cute, and now he's missing again.  
  
Rob comes over. He scrapes his palms checking under every car on her street and when they're unsuccessful he holds himself wrong all evening.  
  
She cries and he holds her on the couch, murmuring about lost puppy posters and cats coming back in the morning along with the milk and paper. He holds her tightly but their hands slip when she sobs, and then she finds herself pulling him into her lap more as his face sinks into her stomach, and he hugs her waist. She feels like a life preserver, but she doesn't mind what she's feeling.  
  
He doesnt say anything but he doesnt have to.  
  
In the morning Waldo comes back and Robert is so happy that he makes them all pancakes. They're in the shapes of animals and fat women, and he acts like Waldo has a preference. But she can tell he's still scared, and later he tells her he's scared that one day Waldo will run out and find somewhere better to be.  
  
"He couldn't," she tells him, rubbing his temples even though she has to reach up to do it. "We both love being here, Rob."  
  
****  
So they decide to buy a house, and chose a ranch home in Laurel Canyon that the realtor doesn't show them at first, because its doorways creak and the stained-glass windows and pointed eaves are churchlike and anachronistic.  
  
It has a yard, though, for Waldo, and an empty pool with the inside painted blue. They put lawn chairs inside of it and play movies against the sloped walls at night, projecting Bogart and Brando and sometimes Jayne Mansfield, sometimes Seth Rogan, all of them blue and huge like gods underwater.  
  
Rob tries to teach Waldo how to skateboard, but despite Waldo's enthusiasm, it never really takes, and she laughs when Waldo gives up, crashing the two of them, and Rob hits his head. Even though she's concerned, he's just so precious sitting on the ground stunned.  
  
****  
  
And for a while things are amazing. She hugs him from behind when he brushes his teeth and then follows him into the shower. She finds him picking his nose one day and it's cuter than gross because she loves him so much and it makes her throw her head back and laugh at his deer-in-headlights expression.  
  
He wakes up before her somedays, and never forgets to make coffee if he's going to work, but most of the time she has to rouse him at  2:30 when he's had a disgusting amount of sleep and there are pillowmarks on his face and the bedroom is already lit up with day.  
  
Waldo brings them lizard tails, and it grosses her out, but he always handles it with laughter and a shovel. She scolds Waldo, but his tail wags, and then she has to give it up because she can't resist her men, even when they eat her shoes.  
  
She buys a bike with a basket even though she never rides it, and on her birthday he brings it out with new tires and ribbons and a picnic tied to the back.  
  
"Why the back?" she says, after fussing over it, and him, in his new straw hat that he can't quite pull off, and she feels warm like when he introduces her as his girlfriend or helps her dad around the house or comes inside of her.  
  
"You're going in the basket," he says, grinning at her like movie lights.  
  
****  
  
Things change, though. She's always known that they would, in the back of her head, that they would get used to each other and going to the store to buy aloe vera and dryer sheets wouldn't be exciting anymore.  
  
Their home is filled with a collection of photographs and newspaper piles. There's a crack in the shower from an earthquake and they've never quite cleaned up the paint he attacked her with when she called him Robby.  
  
There's a mirror on the wall in their living room, and it's beautiful, they got it at a flea market full of housewives, and Robert had to enlist Tom to help carry and hang it on a visiting three-day weekend. It makes the room look huge and sometimes she watches Rob eating the dinners she makes him whenever the mood hits her in it. She likes the way he looks framed.  
  
But one day she looks at herself in the beautiful mirror, as she's eating cereal and it's kind of fascinating how _tired_ she looks. Kristen is too small to carry exhaustion well, her eyes look squinty and her hair looks nappy as fuck, and there's a girl in the mirror and there's a girl outside the mirror, and there are days that she feels like only one of them is her.  
  
When did she get so tired? When did she carry exhaustion under her eyes and in the slopes of her shoulders? Insecurity has deep roots in her, it always has, and she can see herself reflected in the blue and gold living room like a ghost in a world it's been gone from for years. It's a pretty terribly feeling, looking misplaced like this in a room full of things she has loved dearly and chosen by hand.  
  
Rob's built a home for her and she still can't relax in it, and how fucked up is that?  
  
****  
  
When Waldo is two he sleeps on the cool tiles in their front hall during the summer months. His tongue lolls out and sometimes, to Kristen's disgust and amusement, it hits the floor. He's gotten big, and even though he knows when to kiss her frustrations away and when to hide from Rob's moodiness, he still jumps up on new people.  
  
She's not doing so well, everything is fine but this sense of dread and unease saturates and spreads through the back of her mind. It feels like when she gets a bad review and agrees with something that's been said about her. It feels like the pause before she finds out that a family member is sick. It feels like the moment before you get up out of bed and the hangover hits you. She doesn't like it at all.  
  
Kristen's been jumpy lately, as a result, and she gets mad when she wakes up on a  Saturday morning to a puddle of Waldo's drool and silence. Waldo isn't in bed with her anymore, and she's mad because Waldo always curls up with Rob on the couch when he comes home drunk and then sleeps late. It's not at him as much as at herself for not waking him up and letting him know she's mad so he can fix it, but she can never bring herself to wake him up, and she's mad that she needs him to fix it for her and that she relies on him to do so.  
  
It's confusing.  
  
She looks through his camera. Gang signs, his new friends, an actor she vaguely recognizes. Rob, looking goofy but handsome in blue and white plaid and her dark grey scarf she gave him for the wind. His nose is red and he's standing in the street.  
  
She smiles, but the next picture is of a club. It's no surprise; he called to ask if she wanted to come, but she'd been having a lazy night, and she wasn't the one who could sleep in past noon. Anyway, he's at a club, and there's a big group of people, and as she beeps through the night, she can see a girl sitting sideways in Rob's lap.  
  
They're leaning away from each other, and Rob's hands are being used to text, but the girl is holding two beers and Kristen can only assume one is his.  
  
She throws the camera at his head to wake him up, and she suddenly hates the pillow marks on his stupid face. "If you're going to cheat on me, why don't you just document all of it?"  
  
Initially, he's sorry. He apologizes for betraying her trust, for getting drunk and letting girls sit in his lap when the whole world knows he has a girlriend. But he gets defensive eventually; he can't ignore all the attention that he's ever gotten, he'd look like a total fucking asshole, and he barely has any friends in California, so when he gets friendly with a group of people she can't fucking _freak out_ about it.  
  
"We've been living together for a year and half," he argues eventually, when they're shouting at each other in the kitchen in clashing pairs of his boxers and ratty-ass t-shirts, "And you're never even here."  
  
Its not that she always works but he says its like she prefers working to being with him. She's _mad_ when he says that, when he acts like they never do anything together. They live together; what more does he want? So she says "Well what do you expect, Rob? We have things to do," and she wishes that just once when he's mad at her that she was the tall one.  
  
"I moved away from my entire world for you. I want--"  
  
"You wanted to come, you wanted me." She hates it when he makes her feel guilty, because she _knows_ that. But, "Fine. If you don't want to be here, fuck you! Leave!" She walks to their bedroom and opens the window, throws out the guitar he gave her for her birthday and listens to it breaking.  
  
Robert's footsteps stop outside the door and she refuses to turn around; listens to Waldo growling to himself under the kitchen table the way he always does when their voices get louder.  
  
"Shut UP, Waldo," both of them snap, and she turns around.  
  
"I didn't mean that I didn't want to be here," he says. Neither of them meet each others' eyes, but her whole body strains toward him kind of, enough to make her feel like she's going to collapse. "This is what I mean. You don't believe I want this, and after how much time? I love you Krissy but I'm not fucking Edward and I won't pine over you forever if you dont love me back."  
  
****  
  
She writes it on a piece of paper because it's hard to look him in the eyes and tell him things that haven't been written by someone smarter and better at this. In the end she slips the paper into his hand on his way out, and he knows enough of her quirks by now that she doubts he'll read it until he's far enough away to miss her.  
  
_i want you to know that i love you very very much. and that we will always be enough for each other._  
  
Under it she underlined REALLY.  
  
Then he comes back,  11:12 in the morning, too late for wishes. He apologizes quietly, standing in the front yard amongst the green ferns and cool November humidity. "I couldnt stand it if you cheated on me," she says quietly, so he understands her reactions to nothing.  
  
"I couldnt either," he promises. She tilts her head up and he presses his palm to her cheek.  
  
****  
  
They go on vacation, and its great for three days, until they miss Waldo and come home early.  
  
****  
  
Robert and Kristen walk their dog to the overpriced grocery store nearest their home. Rob tries Kristen's vanilla latte, but he doesn't like it, and he makes a face to hear her laugh at it. It's a grey winter day, and she's bundled up in hoodies and flannels and Lucky jeans. Rob is wearing his swim trunks, because he is crazy, but at least his thermal shirt is warm. When he walks the legs of his trunks make a zwip zwipping noise, and Waldo barks at it sometimes.  
So they're laughing, and she's carrying an umbrella just in case, and he switches Waldo's leash so that he can hold her hand, and she starts to feel like this is the beginning of a pretty good forever.


End file.
